Wednesday, October 21, 2009

What are the reviews saying?

Windows 7 comes out tomorrow, and I thought this would be an excellent time to look back at the Windows Vista launch.

As we know now, Vista made a poor showing for itself when it was released, and performance issues and other problems dogged it for the last 3 years. But how was Vista reviews on the eve of its release? Tech writer Harry McCracken gives us a recap of the very positive reviews of the then-upcoming Windows Vista.

The reviews for tomorrow's Windows 7 launch are looking great. People are saying that Windows 7 runs better and is more stable than Windows Vista. Lots of people are waxing poetic about Windows 7.

But the reviews for Windows Vista were similarly awesome, yet the OS was a huge disappointment. What to think about Windows 7? Color me skeptical; I'll wait to see proof.

9 comments:

Interestingly, InfoWorld published an article about Win7 performance. SPEC Viewperf 10 improved from XP to Win7, but flat from Vista to Win7. Cinebench 10 looked flat across all three. They said:

"These results suggests that when considering Windows 7, performance should be viewed as a reasonable justification for upgrading from Windows XP, but not a driver for migration from Vista. (There are unrelated reasons to upgrade from Vista, as discussed below and in other articles on InfoWorld.) The flat performance results against Vista are reasonable given that, as we noted earlier, Windows 7 is based on the Vista kernel."

And:

"What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch." [It's because of the threading model.]

Even people (like sjvn) who have said that Vista is a dead duck before the release have been praising w7 so I'd bet that w7 does become the next mainstream MS OS. Having said that, I will do my best to avoid ever working with it because it is restrictive and riddled with spyware to ensure that Big Brother is watching me and that I behave as MS expect me to. Screw that, I love my freedom.

Greg pointed me to this review by Tux Radar, comparing Ubuntu with Windows 7. It starts by comparing the time required to install each, space used, and ease of install. Then it moves on to daily tasks, like time to boot, time to shutdown, copying files to/from USB, and copying files on the hard drive.

Pretty much across the board, Linux does better than Windows.

Worth a read. I especially liked this bit in the review, which commented on something I've experienced in Vista lots of times. I thought it was just me, but if others are seeing it ...

Both Vista and Windows 7 seemed to introduce random delays when deleting files. For example, about one in three times when deleting the files from our filesystem benchmark, this screen below would appear and do nothing for 25-30 seconds before suddenly springing into action and deleting the files. However, this wasn't part of our benchmark, so isn't included in the numbers above.

I've always been surprised at the positive reviews of Windows 7 - why do people seem to be gushing over basic stuff like stability? It basically sounds like a bugfixed Vista that's been given some graphical improvements, which isn't saying much for either OS quite frankly. Why exactly is it so much better than XP (which works fine still as a gaming OS on a dualbooted box) when all it is is what Vista should have been at release?

@Anonymous: I agree with you, definitely. I talked about that in another post. People are getting very excited that Windows 7 is "stable" and "runs great". Why is this even an issue? Because Windows Vista hasn't been that great.

There's a reason people have been sticking with WinXP - because it doesn't crash on them. So now people are all excited about how great Windows 7 runs, how it's "stable". I try to point this out as a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome.

About me

I've been a Linux user since 1993, and since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. But, I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows and Linux has been shocking, to say the least. Since I find it interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years.